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Stop With The Resolutions, Start With The Crack

It’s New Year’s again. And once again, I am here, my Utah-bred sense of moral superiority on full throttle (hookers and blow notwithstanding) to pour gallons of icy cold, sobering water on all the excitement.

New Year’s resolutions are great and all — they really are good; they come from “the right place”, people make them for good reasons. But as any AJATTeer knows,good reasons are bad. If what we needed were good reasons, there’d be no smokers and we’d all be nice to our mothers 😛 .

Perhaps I’m just an inveterate iconoclast. I haven’t always hated holidays, but I definitely started hating them young. And why? Well, because I got and get the sneaky feeling that other people are trying to tell uz when and how to be happy, when to feel good. Well, screw being happy 1 day a year, or even 2 days a week. Give me the other 5. Give me all 365. Monday morning is my cartoon and pyjamas time, beaches 😉 .

You don’t need New Year’s. You needn’t be bound by it. You’re bigger and better than some date system that some NAMBLA guys made a thousand years ago or whenever. Every day — or, at the very least, every month — can be your New Year’s.

But enough from me. Sometimes (OK, all the time, shaddup, I know), other people word things way better than me. Such is the case with “Making Yourself Happy: The Value of Setting Short-Term Goals“, an essay by Dr. Ted Sielaff, Emeritus Professor of Business at San Jose State University, of which the following is an excerpt:

New Year’s Resolutions are behaviorally unsound. In order to keep doing something, we need periodic reinforcement, like recognition or reward. That is lacking with New Year’s Resolutions. Usually New Year’s Resolutions are too grandiose, like: I’m going to get myself fit this year. Or, I’m going to finish my MBA this year. Too much for most of us.

I have found it better to set goals for just a month, like this: “I want to finish the first draft of the chapter of my book on “The People Living in Yosemite Park”. That would be a doable goal if I worked at it every day and had my research done. And, at the end of the month, I could check to see if I reached it.

In stating the short term goal, you should make it specific and measurable. Don’t say something like: “I intend to write every day”. That is too vague.

I have found that if I set short term goals for myself that are in harmony with a bigger strategy that I have I can be very happy. And, the interesting thing is that these short term goals often fit together in building a bigger picture.

Actually, this year is the first year in ages that I actually have made a “new years” resolution (see website field), but I did make sure to make it small and winnable, and frankly, the only reason it is a new years resolution, is because I held out for a few weeks so I could call it one :P. Setting out for a whole year was admittedly a bit presumptuous though; I’ll just have to prove myself right.

“In setting goals, you can be happy if the goal is doable — something, that is within your power to accomplish in a relatively short period of time.”

makes something khatzu has been saying begin to resonate. The aforementioned grandiosity of typical New Year resolutions fails to provide any detail about how the resolution is meant to be accomplished. Mixing that with khatzu’s \’small goals\’ mantra gives you something like “Get fit this year.” => “Stand outside wearing trainers.”

I think the idea of small goals makes two important points. It reduces the level of grandiosity to that makes the task feel less onerous and it provides a level of detail that is sufficient to get the shaping up started. Both of these qualities seem to me to make the goal feel more tangible if only at a subconscious level.

This is also where the desirability of the process is important. The act of achieving a small goal leaves you in position to begin the fun activity that will inevitably result in the desired goal. The \’activation energy\’ of achieving the goal is thus reduced and, depending on the intensity of the desire to engage in the process, may even be negative. I think this is the point of “Starting with the crack”.

So instead of resolving to do something, maybe we should consider where we’d like to be and let our environments take us there (of course implying that you’ve suitably prepared your environment). It seems more and more like this blog is a guide to responsible stewardship of our subconsciouses. We know what we like. We know what buttons to push. We just have to design our environments such that our buttons push themselves!

I can totally hook you up with a guy who’s been living in a cabin in Yosemite for a long time. He doesn’t know it’s not the 70’s, so the crack is surely still there. He likes people and is a nice guy. He helped us get into my car after hiking for a week and realizing on the last day that we’d left the car keys at the starting point. Just ask for Jake at the gate.